


like the sun

by hundredhanded



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Fight Scene, Gen, Revenge, edward gets what's coming to him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-05
Updated: 2018-02-05
Packaged: 2019-03-14 08:38:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13586382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hundredhanded/pseuds/hundredhanded
Summary: Lup spent a decade in the confines of the Umbra Staff, watching and waiting. She had one visitor—and she made that visitor suffer. (A view of Lup and Edward's fight from within the Umbra Staff.)





	like the sun

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers up through episode 67.

Edward was a lich of first-rate power. He had learned the same lesson that so many liches before him had learned—there is power, great power, in suffering. And two hundred years of feeding on the suffering of hapless adventurers wrought Edward and his sister into something fearsome, malignant, desirious. Parasites, attached to the flank of a cow, growing swollen and corpulescent on blood; voids in space, terrible emptinesses, absences of warmth or kindness or light or love; storms, implacable, frostbite-bearing, resistant to torch or spell or inferno.

Edward and Lydia believed themselves the most powerful magical beings in all of Faerun, and for many hundreds of years they were correct in this belief. But Lup was not from Faerûn. Lup had spent the past hundred years fleeing from, and fighting, the greatest enemy the planes had ever known. Hers was not a power borne of suffering, but of study, of sacrifice, of bravery, of _love_.

Lup, in all her glory, all her white-hot, unyielding power, all her love, was luminescent, nuclear, indomitable. Like the sun.

All the suffering in the world cannot hope to match the power or wisdom gained from love. And even the most powerful wizard in all a world cannot hope to match the power of a sun.

* * *

"Are you the one who's been hurting my brother out there?" Lup's face, still streaked with tears, is a mask of fury, terrible to behold. The air—or what passes for air, here in the Umbra Staff, outside of time and space—begins to crackle and spit around her, ozonic and ominous.

"Who are you? What is this place?" Edward has not felt fear in many hundreds of years, perhaps never in his unlife. But now he is filled with apprehension—at his sudden departure from Wonderland, the absence of Lydia, the silence of the room in which he has arrived, and the palpable rage emanating from the figure in front of him.

A moment of silence. Edward beholds the figure before him assume a stance of combat, her eyes narrow. She lifts a robe-clad arm to her cheeks, cleaning off the tracks left by her tears, then fixes him with a stare—and he senses power welling up inside her, unimaginable, incomprehensible, one that could boil away the oceans and scorch the very sky. Power so massive that he assumes, in his arrogance, that this must be a trick, some illusion magic cast upon him by that elf, Taako, the worm. The _worm_. Edward imagines the sound of the elf breathing his last and smiles. Then the strange elf before him speaks.

"I'm going to _fucking kill you now_ ," she spits, and now Edward feels fear, its grasp like a cold knife through his stomach—and then rage, rage at this _thing_ in front of him, this interloper that thinks it can destroy _him_ , and he bares his teeth and snarls, and leaps forward, calling all his magic and cunning and pain to bear upon Lup, to rend, to rip, to kill.

There are no names for the spells that liches cast. Mortals would perhaps, were they granted such power, name and taxonimize these evocations and invocations, but for a lich there is no hope of cataloguing the avenues of power available to them, no more than a mortal could ever hope to give a name to every drop of water in the sea. Edward and Lup spit curses at each other—terrible, powerful words that sear the air, words that carry in their syllables the power to tear flesh to ribbons and shatter bones to dust. Bolts of fire erupt from hands and fingertips, burning white-hot and leaving terrible scars on the walls of the umbrella's room. Beams of necromantic energy, each powerful enough to raise every corpse in ten thousand graveyards, swirl around both liches and careen forward, biting and ripping and raging. The liches twist in the air, swifter than any bird, blinking from point to point, dodging the blades of energy that careen and scream through every inch of space.

Lup knows that she can _defeat_ Edward. But to _destroy_ him? Destroy him like he deserves, the scum, he who has been hurting and hurting and _hurting_ Taako? That takes a while longer. Not that those outside the Umbra Staff see it—time flows differently here, not steadily, more in fits and spurts.

_He's not watching his back—draw him away—create fire-selves in front of him, make sure they move like me—get him focused on his front—then blink to his back—yes— **YES** —_

Before Edward can react, Lup is behind him, hands together, a beam of flame flowing from her hands and through his torso. She sticks her fingers through Edward's sternum—he says nothing, but his eyes go wide—and she whispers something horrible, eldrich words, malignant and annihilatory ones. Then she lets her rage take over, pulling his essence taut and _slamming_ him into the walls, back and forth and back and forth, the impacts reverberating up and down her arm, Edward's form crunching and splatting with the impact, until all that remains is something that, were it corporeal, would be small, wet, and bleeding.

(Outside, an elf, dwarf, and human hear strange impacts from inside an umbrella.)

And the remnants of Edward's form burn away, quickly, like a magician's flash-paper in her hands, and the room inside the Umbra Staff is deathly quiet once again, punctuated only by Lup's heaving breaths.

* * *

In the realm outside of the Umbra Staff, a vogue elf is unceremoniously spit out of an umbrella. With the last of his energy, he looks for his sister, but he cannot see her, and everything is growing so cold. He dissolves into ash before he can cry out.

* * *

Some hours later, the Hunger is swirling down, its tendrils erupting from Faerûnian skies. The apocalypse is nigh.Lup, seated in the center of the room, legs folded beneath her, meditates, drawing and refining all her remaining power.

She feels Angus's little hands curl around the handle of the umbrella, and she feels him channel energies for a magic missile.

"That won't do, little man," she whispers. She mutters some words and traces some shapes in the air. "Try this." Outside, a fireball erupts from the end of the Umbra Staff. Angus squeaks in surprise, and Lup grins.

"Holy shit!" She hears Taako's profanity outside, and smiles. _You haven't seen anything yet, brother of mine._

She feels Taako take the Umbra Staff in his hands, and she knows that this is her one chance.

* * *

Magical items cannot be broken. Normally. Unless the time is right.

As Taako's knee meets the staff's wood, Lup feels the curtains shift, change, deteriorate. They are vulnerable now, she knows, and without thinking she channels all her might, all her rage, all the sorrow accumulated from ten long years trapped in this prison, and summons flame that consumes every inch of the space inside the Umbra Staff.

The curtains do not wish to be burnt—they resist. But all the resistance in the world cannot hope to match the fire of a sun.

* * *

As Lup spirals up and out of the Umbra Staff, the Hunger is almost an afterthought. She's burned it before; she knows what to say to scorch its veins and arteries. A more pressing question is how to keep her friends alive, but even this gives her no pause—her fingers move, twisting invisible strings, and the tendrils of fire weave and swirl around her friends and their shocked faces. Dear Magnus's jaw is on the floor, and good ol' Merle is already dancing a preemptive victory jig. And the joy and relief on Lucretia's face—well, it's indescribable.

She sees Taako, awestruck and disbelieving, and a smile curls over her face like a brushfire across a field.

She swoops down before him, and the joy at seeing her brother's face after ten long years is only equaled by the joy of the burn she is about to lay on him.

_I'm gonna expose this motherfucker. In front of everyone._

> "You're dating the Grim Reaper?"

**Author's Note:**

> This here's my first TAZ fic. Catch me on [Tumblr](https://hundred-handed.tumblr.com).


End file.
